He Didn't Give at the Office
Johnson, Scott W.
He Didn’t Give at the Offi ce Remember that picture of Yasser Arafat, blood donor? BY SCOTT W. JOHNSON Charles Enderlin is the France 2 Jerusalem correspondent who broadcast the...
...Jadallah’s photograph provides a wider view of the scene depicted in Hana’s second photograph, with the male medical official displaying Arafat’s voluminous blood donation with the assistance of the uniformed security offi cial...
...So we can perhaps be grateful for Enderlin’s retrospective, however tardy, on one of Yasser Arafat’s trivial deceptions, foisted on readers all over the world by credulous news services...
...The story of Arafat’s blood donation was reported around the world in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, usually accompanied by photographs depicting Arafat in the apparent act of giving blood at the Shifa Hospital in Gaza City...
...At the time the photographs were published in 2001, Middle East Forum scholar Ronni Gordon Stillman observed in a column for National Review Online: “Can journalists really be fooled by these Kodak moments...
...Reuters itself helpfully advises visitors that Jadallah “shoots reportages of Palestinian funerals and Israeli violence” almost daily...
...Flogging his new book on the Israeli-Palestinian confl ict (The Lost Years) at Harvard’s Center for European Studies on January 17, Enderlin himself exposed a probable Palestinian media hoax in which he had no involvement...
...Should we take his word for it...
...In short, the anwer is yes...
...The donation is about to be made...
...The reporters took the requisite photographs...
...As Joel Pollak recounted online at the site Guide to the Perplexed, Enderlin told his Harvard audience “that Yasser Arafat had faked his blood donation to the victims of the September 11th attacks...
...Reuters also ingenuously discloses: “He sees it as his mission to have the world see the despair of the Palestinian people...
...Both photos ran with a caption that reads like a press release: “Arafat, along with hundreds of Palestinians, participated in a blood drive for the victims of the deadly airline hijackings in the United States, which he condemned as a ‘horrible attack.’ ” We all know how much Arafat disliked horrible attacks by Arab terrorists...
...And, we can fairly assume, the benefactions of their late chairman...
...So Enderlin’s description of the photos as staged comports with “the ocular proof...
...In the other AP photo, Arafat has apparently given his blood...
...The story exposed by Enderlin involved widely circulated reports by the Associated Press, Reuters, and the BBC...
...The AP subsequently updated the caption to indicate that “doctors said that the 5-year-old Palestinian girl initially believed to have been killed by an Israeli military strike Wednesday apparently died after sustaining head injuries during a fall from a swing in the same area before the strike...
...In neither photo is a needle in evidence...
...Reuters’s Ahmed Jadallah, for his part, is clearly on the team he’s covering...
...At the least, we should demand to see what Othello called “the ocular proof...
...pathized with the victims of the attack in the United States despite their criticism of U.S...
...A nurse with a head scarf is about to search for the chairman’s vein, Arafat looking on at his arm...
...His blood has not yet been drawn and no blood is in evidence...
...What does the record reveal about them...
...Among the work of AP photographer Adel Hana is a 2006 photograph claiming to show a Palestinian girl killed by an Israeli airstrike against “Islamic militants” being carried into the Shifa Hospital by a grieving relative surrounded by armed men...
...support for Israel during the Palestinian uprising...
...Do the photographs conform to Enderlin’s description of them...
...In the fi rst AP photo, Arafat is prostrate...
...With Enderlin’s gloss, the photo takes on a comic aspect...
...But what about the photographers...
...it takes two hands to hold all the blood donated by the chairman to the beloved American people...
...Israeli authorities have barred him from going to Reuters’s main office in Jerusalem...
...According to Pollak’s account of Enderlin’s remarks, “Arafat didn’t like needles, and so the doctor put a needle near his arm and agitated a bag of blood...
...Enderlin elaborated on his contention that the scene depicted in the photographs was staged...
...Enderlin said the event had been staged for the media to counteract the embarrassing television images of Palestinians celebrating in the streets after the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks...
...Reuters photographer Ahmed Jadallah also took a widely disseminated photograph of Arafat giving blood on September 12...
...Based on film footage provided by a Palestinian cameraman, Enderlin’s report has become infamous among students of Arab propaganda both for its destructive effects and for its probable falsity...
...But taking Enderlin’s word for the hoax is a bit like trusting the paradoxical assertion of Epimenides, the Cretan philosopher who famously declared that all Cretans are liars...
...Two photographs of a reclining Arafat are credited to the AP’s Adel Hana...
...BY SCOTT W. JOHNSON Charles Enderlin is the France 2 Jerusalem correspondent who broadcast the incendiary account of the death of 12-yearold Muhammad al-Dura at the hands of Israeli troops operating in the Gaza Strip in September 2000...
...Enderlin is certainly an experienced and knowledgeable reporter on the Israeli-Palestinian confl ict...
...The Reuters caption also reads like a press release covering talking points: “Palestinians said they symScott W. Johnson is a Minneapolis attorney and contributor to the blog Power Line...
...The nurse with the head scarf is nowhere to be seen...
...Nevertheless, it should be noted that sophisticated consumers of news from that part of the world didn’t much need Enderlin’s help to tumble to this particular Arafat hoax...
...In her place, a kneeling male medical offi cial with his back to the camera jointly holds a nearly bursting bag of blood together with a uniformed security offi cer...
...Rather, Arafat stares warily at the tourniquet placed around his bare arm...
...It’s diffi cult to imagine...
...The al-Dura affair now bids to join the Dreyfus affair in the French hall of shame...
...And yet, Arafat’s condolences to the American people were broadcast far and wide, with no mention that on that same day the Palestinian Authority’s newspaper praised suicide bombers as ‘the noble successors of their noble predecessors . . . the salt of the earth, the engines of history . . . the most honorable people among us.’” Unfortunately, Saul Bellow’s epigram looks like an eternal verity: “A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep...
...Heavy lifting is required...
...It is a heartbreaking photograph...
Vol. 13 • February 2008 • No. 20
